Earthquake Watch Skill

"Did we just have an earthquake?" gets asked within seconds of every tremor, and the USGS answers globally in near-real-time over keyless HTTPS. This skill knows the feed matrix (magnitude threshold × time window), filters to the place actually asked about, and frames magnitudes honestly — a 4.5 under a city and a 6.0 under the ocean are different events, and depth is half the story. For anything safety-shaped, it points at official emergency guidance rather than improvising any.

What This Skill Produces

• The events — matching quakes with magnitude, depth, location, and time (converted to the user's zone)
• The context read — what that magnitude/depth typically means for feeling it and damage, as bands not predictions
• The regional filter — the feed is global; the answer is about the place asked
• The command — exact curl, rerunnable

Required Inputs

Ask for these if not provided:

• Where — a place to filter around (the feeds are global; lat/lon of the place makes distance filtering honest)
• The window — "just now" (past hour feed), today, this week
• The threshold — significant-only vs. everything-they-can-feel (M2.5+) vs. research-grade (all)

Framework: The Feed Matrix and the Framing

1. The feeds — https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/feed/v1.0/summary/{mag}_{window}.geojson where mag ∈ significant, 4.5, 2.5, 1.0, all and window ∈ hour, day, week, month. "Just felt something" → 2.5_hour; "big ones today" → 4.5_day. Each feature: properties.mag, .place, .time (epoch ms), .url (event page), geometry.coordinates = [lon, lat, depth km].
2. Targeted queries beat feed-filtering for specific regions: — the fdsnws endpoint takes radius, time, magnitude bounds directly.